Banana-Cran-Almond Baked Oats

Can I confess something?  I suck at making oatmeal.  I have no patience when it's time for breakfast so I go the microwave route for oats and it ends up overflowing and making a huge mess.  So I throw it away and have cereal or toast in the end anyways.

However, one of my favorite Iowa bloggers has a plethora of baked oatmeal recipes on her site.  I took a few notes from this recipe and doubled it - because if I’m spending this much time making breakfast, it had better last for a couple meals.

I also suck at eating bananas in time for the still-partly-green form that I prefer, so it gave me an excuse to use a couple of these guys:

Ingredients

• 2/3 cup rolled oats (a.k.a. old-fashioned oats)
• 2/3 cup milk (any kind… I used 1%)
• 2/3 cup water
• 2 overripe bananas, mashed
• handful dried cranberries
• dash vanilla extract
• dash cinnamon
• dash salt

For the topping:

•  handful sliced almonds
• sprinkle brown sugar

Turn the oven to 375 degrees.  Mix together the first ingredients, through the salt.  At this point I was a little nervous because it seemed like way too much liquid:

Pop it in the oven for 25 minutes (without the topping at this point).  When you take it out after 25 minutes, it will be set up a little better so you can put the topping on.   Look what my brown sugar looked like when I took it out of the box!

I just bought it the other day.  The dry Nevada air must have gotten to it.  Per the instructions on the box, I wrapped the sugar brick in a damp paper towel, stuck it in a paper bag and microwaved it for 2 minutes.  It was scorching hot but crumbled easily at that point.  5 more minutes under the broiler and my oats looked like this:

SCORCHED!

In conclusion, I still suck at cooking oats.  Maybe I’ll buy a torch for my next stab at brulee.  Refusing to throw away my hard-earned oats, I scraped off the burnt parts and can happily report that what lies beneath was still delicious:

Rated:  fail - redeemed!